Ramblins and tutorials

Lately, I’ve taken up an interest in synchronizing video scores to my favorite recording of a piece, as I have done with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor.
One of the most important parts of creating the videos is getting good images of the score. Luckily, the Petrucci Music Library (IMSLP) has a vast collection of scores for music that has entered the public domain, but they’re not always in the best format for videos – generally too small.
Sometimes, there’s not a lot one can do, especially when the PDF is a scan of a physical score, but when it is typeset in a computer program and exported, the “perfection” of the score can be exploited to do some interesting things.
In this post, I mess with the score of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 7 to make it more video-friendly.

Python is my favorite programming/scripting language for mathematics, and there has been extensive work in applying it to various fields of study.
For this post, I will apply it to modular exponentiation, also known as “power modulus”, and I use it in primality tests. There have been many implementations of the function - some of which may be seen on the linked Wikipedia page.

Recently, I’ve been working on something in Dropbox, and I’ve found the version control… lacking. Well, it’s nothing like having the full power of Git, my favorite version control system. That’s for sure.

Note that the images here will be for Ubuntu 13.04, but the same, general procedure should work for any version of Ubuntu, other Linuxes, Windows, and Mac, provided that the Dropbox client on the platform supports Selective Sync, which is what this whole method will revolve around. The process isn’t too hard, but, in my opinion, the reward definitely makes it worth it.

I’ve always been wondering why I couldn’t use hostnames in my ssh commands (like ssh pi@raspberrypi), so I’ve been using IP addresses the entire time (e.g. ssh pi@192.168.1.31). Today, I’ve finally figured out how to use easier-to-remember hostnames in Linux, and the good thing is that it’s pretty simple to do.

Linux is awesome. However, there are always its shortcomings, such as hardware not being recognized. For my laptop, a Toshiba Satellite L655, I must compile my own, custom kernel such that Ubuntu will see my battery’s charge. The original solution for this problem is from Techinterplay here, but I have made a few modifications of my own to make the process even more efficient.

A few weeks ago, I saw a great video by Numberphile on YouTube, and it got me thinking - I can do something like this. So, the next morning, I started up a Git repository and got to it. First thing to do was creating constant tones, which led me on quite a journey by itself.